Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

The Cherokees showed on the scene.

He was leaning against a wall with a can of Rheingold in his hand, his tie jerked down to the side, collar open and the heat, body odor, smoke and beer fumes of the rooms closing in. The sweet odor of tea filtered around him. He was talking to little Clipper Adderlee about the Prospect Park war, when the sounds of bowling against the wall stopped. A dead silence from outside, and then they heard Greaseball’s high almost-feminine voice shouting something incomprehensible.

Fish emerged from the smoke and Connie’s embrace and yelled at Poop, “Shut off that squawker!”

Poop slammed the tone arm of the record player aside and in the sudden loss of music there was a total absence of voices in the rooms. They stayed quite still and listened. Then they made out what Greaseball was saying, over and over, loud and high, till he was suddenly cut off with a squeak.

“Cherokees!”

Candle showed from a back room where Lockup had gone to fetch him, and stood with his legs wide apart, his eyes blazing for the fight to come. “Okay you guys, get the goddamn lead out!”

Tiger, whose haircut always left him looking like a Fussiwatti, sprinted through the packed mob of kids and reached a big box set against one wall. He pulled a keychain from his pocket and opened the double padlocks. Then the lid went up, and miraculously everyone had a weapon.

The sounds of argument outside grew more violent, and once the crash of a bowling ball going through the showcase split the background down the middle. Rusty felt someone shoving a zip into his hand and a few .22 slugs.

He tried to hand it back, tried to get to the rear door, but his path was blocked by dozens of Cougars and their debs preparing for the rumble.

Braced against his thigh, Fish had a long pole with a jagged piece of glass on its end. He was positioned right in front of the door with the deadly thing angled up to head level.

The others brandished zip guns, switchblades, wrenches, lengths of pipe, homemade knucks, bricks. One girl had a four-foot spike of some sort, stolen from a railroad yard, and she hefted it like an experienced warrior.

“Let ’em come!” Candle screamed, his face swollen with fury and the desire for blood.

Dwarfy Lockup threw open the bolts on the door and before Rusty could help himself, he was being borne forward through the opened door, into the alley proper. The Cherokees were out in strength. The faces of their girls, the Rockettes, were as violent as their own. When the rival gang saw the Cougars streaming out of the back rooms, a wild cry went up and they left the battered shape of Greaseball Bolley—slipping wetly to the linoleum—and charged straight across the polished alleys.

They met head-on in the middle of the twelfth lane.

rusty santoro

It was like nothing but hell with screams.

The first bunch of Cherokees came sliding and stomping across the hardwood alleys, their heavy army boots leaving big black marks on the polished wood. The glitter of knife blades and the dull black of revolvers was mixed with the red of faces and the white of staring eyes. They came in fast and the Cougars met them without hesitation. Fish was the first one forward and the glass-end stick came down and jabbed a Cherokee with such impact, the point of the glass entered the boy’s right eye, sending him spilling backward.

The boy screamed so shrilly, everyone paused a quarter-instant in mid-step, and then went back to clashing. The boy lay there, feeling the runny wetness that had been his right eye and Fish remained stock-still where the force of the strike had stopped him. Sick, he stared at the mess and started to turn, to run away.

A girl materialized from nowhere with a lead pipe and with a round-cross slam caught Fish alongside the ear. He gurgled something low and pitched over, the side of his head bleeding, the stick and glass dropping to the alley unnoticed.

The blinded Cherokee was lying on his side, crying loudly, running his fingers over his cheeks, feeling his eye socket where nothing but a pulped mass remained. He bit his lips and fainted.

The girl stared at him for a moment, then bent over and began to apply the pipe to Fish with accuracy and ferocity. Rusty watched her for a moment, hardly believing the cool methodicalness with which she was beating him to death. Then he high-leaped over two boys wrestling on the floor before him, and was on her. He grabbed the pipe as it came up and twisted the girl by the shoulder with his free hand.

The girl turned, surprised, and Rusty belted her as hard as he could in the mouth. Her lips tightened back against her teeth, her teeth broke and she fell over gasping.

He turned, to escape, but there was no way out.

A shot rang loud in the place and he knew someone had started with the zip guns. The one in his pocket felt too big, too unhealthy and he tried to get back through the crowd to the club rooms—to escape through the rear exit.

He saw Candle in a clash with a blond knifeman from the Cherokees. Each was slashing at the other with a long Italian switch. Candle eased back, walloped the boy’s arm away and caught him dead center in the thigh with the blade. In and out it went quicksilver fast and the boy slumped over. Candle went to work with his stomping boots.

All over the room kids were clubbing each other, working the rubberband-driven zip guns, firing guns, slashing high and hard with warm steel, and he was getting sick again, for the smoothly polished hardwood alleys were starting to become slippery.

A thick-faced Cherokee with a scar over his left eye came at Rusty with a length of chain, and the whip of it was a banshee wail in his ears. Rusty tried to duck away, but he fell toward the assailant.

Rusty fumbled in his pocket, and came up with the zip. He had somehow loaded one of the .22 slugs into the sawed-off car antenna that was the gun’s barrel and now he pulled back the firing pin, let it zip into the barrel.

The gun exploded with a slam and the bullet took the Cherokee high in his right arm. A hole as big as a crater opened and bloody cartilage sprayed back, filthying Rusty’s shirt and tie. The boy screamed at the pain, dropped the chain and limped back into the mob. Rusty fished in his pocket for the remaining slugs and with the zip threw them from him, under a row of lockers.

The siren wail of police cars broke through the gang screams and the swearing and the sounds of battle, and everyone stopped again, for just a split-second. Then joined in a common bond of hatred for The Men, they started tumbling over one another to get to the exits—occasionally taking a slash or a swipe at an enemy nearby.

But the cops had the place surrounded already. Before anyone could escape—leaving the injured writhing on the floor—the place was crowded with blue-jacketed shapes and the horde began to pull together. Rusty saw one boy try to dive through the front window, saw him leap, saw him nearly grabbed by a fuzz. The kid sailed through the air, his foot was snared by the cop, and the boy went only partially out the window. He landed with a crash, belly-slammed through the glass, the plate window shattering on all sides. When the cop dragged him out, his hands and face were bleeding, shredded meat.

All around him Rusty heard the screams of frightened kids and he wished he had not lingered at the dance. He wished high and hard. This was bad, particularly with him in Pancoast’s custody. But there seemed no way out, no way to escape being dragged in. It somehow, terrifyingly, seemed predestined. He was forging his own chains. He never should have come down here tonight where the hell was out.

Then he was ducking past a heavy blue sleeve and a hard face and running for the back way. A path cleared before him miraculously and he dove through, thinking he was free.